VOLUME 1 ISSUE 1 SPRING 2015

which light flows, i.e. nature, common innate concepts and God”. These “three streams of knowledge shall bear the whole three-founted light of God within a full watercourse”. Then we shall have “the greatest blaze of light one can have” (Komenský 1961, 75). Comenius is convinced that all three streams of illumination come from one source: God is one and the same spiritual power which reveals itself internally to the prophets and mystics; which endows us with the faculty of reasoning and which created the outer nature as well. This is the underlying intuition (or presupposition) of sophiology. Therefore, harmony between the senses, reason and faith constituted a  criterion of the veracity of knowledge for Comenius. If they are not in concert, it implies that something is not working well: one or more of them must be revised. That is why Comenius regarded the rupture between theology and philosophy, and their separation from the sciences as a symptom of regrettable particularism and losing one’s way. The beginning of the 17th century was an important crossroads. The renaissance ideal of universal knowledge had just fallen apart in the time of Comenius. In France, René Descartes (1596–1650) developed a one-sided rationalism distrusting of the senses. In England, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) developed a one-sided empiricism that underrated reason and rejected even mathematics. Accepting an invitation from the English parliament to London in 1641, Comenius introduced his project of a pansophic academy, which was to unite all material and spiritual knowledge on a common ground. However, unsettled political circumstances prevented its realization. In the Netherlands in 1642 he met Descartes but did not succeed in persuading him. Whereas for Comenius “philosophy without divine revelation is incomplete”, Descartes replied: “I will not step beyond philosophy, hence a piece of what is a whole with thee shall remain with me” (Komenský 1924, 47–8). In the end, only a synthesis of French rationalism with English empiricism occurred on which contemporary academies and universities are based. The Slavonic requirement of integrality and the inclusion of revelation fell short. As induction is characteristic for Bacon and deduction for Descartes, what is characteristic for Comenius is his syncritic method. Synkrisis is a comparison and unification; a kind of synthesis. It is an integral approach, a method of pansophy. It assumes the world has been created harmoniously according to a uniform idea and it possesses a fractal-like structure. Everything testifies to everything, and any part permits assumptions about the whole and the whole about its parts; by comparison, one can penetrate to the essence of things thanks to universal analogy. The syncritic method grasps the meaning of things as a whole, consummating knowledge and leading to insights of a moral kind. By applying it, we enter into a relationship of intimacy with reality instead of a reserved distance. Comenius could point at a rose and thus instruct a child: just as the flower appeared at the end of a thorny stem, so you too can attain virtue only by way of renunciation in your life. Comenius’ ars docendi (art of teaching) relies in particular on this method of analogy, which interprets reality “with love and grace” (Palouš 1992, 32). Spirituality Studies 1 (1) Spring 2015 45 (9)

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